Development of GTAP version 10 Land Use and Land Cover Data Base for years 2004, 2007, 2011 and 2014

Understanding the challenges of achieving environmental sustainability goals given future demand for food, fiber and fuel requires economic frameworks that incorporate spatially explicit information on land use and land cover (LULC). The GTAP LULC Data Base and its variants have been extensively used in a wide variety of applications aimed at examining the land-environment-energy nexus (Golub et al., 2012; Hertel et al., 2010; Johnson et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2014; Peña-Lévano et al., 2019; Stevenson et al., 2013; Taheripour et al., 2010; Taheripour & Tyner, 2012). The first release of the GTAP LULC Data Base combines geospatial data on land use and land cover into GTAP 6 Data Base - benchmarked to year 2001 (GTAP LULC v6). The methodology for creating and using this database is well documented (Lee et al., 2009; C. Monfreda et al., 2009; Sohngen et al., 2008). Succeeding updates of the GTAP LULC Data Base (namely v7 and v8 for 2004 and v8 for 2004, 2007) relied on readily available but aggregated GTAP LULC v6, albeit using national-level data from FAOSTAT (2020) (Avetisyan et al., 2010; Baldos & Hertel, 2012). Starting with GTAP 9, LULC was created directly from the latest, high-resolution (i.e. 5-minute) spatial land cover and land use maps in combination with national-level statistics (Baldos, 2017). This memorandum documents the development of the GTAP LULC version10A which is based on the GTAP v10A Data Base for years 2004, 2007, 2011 and 2014 (Aguiar et al., 2019). This update heavily relies on the methodology for creating GTAP LULC v9 which downscales national-level land cover and crop production statistics from FAOSTAT (2020) using publicly available spatial data (see Appendix I).